Lunacy Audio has released Haze & Filter, a new free chorus with a shimmering character and a creative filter for macOS and Windows.
It’s the weekend, and it starts well with a message that will please friends of free audio plugins.
Lunacy Audio, the developer company of the Beam multi-FX plugin, has released Haze and Filter, a new chorus and filter plugin compatible with macOS and Windows.
Lunacy Audio Haze & Filter
Haze is a new hybrid chorus/phase effect plugin that combines chorus, reverb, and dispersion in one unique free effect plugin. According to Lunacy Audio, Haze is capable of transforming any sound into a shimmering, wide, and atmospheric texture.
The plugin is based on a diffusion network, which can be controlled with the first three parameters: decay, density, and spread.
Decay sets how long the reverb sounds, ranging from short, snappy reflections to deep, atmospheric tails. That sounds like a neat range with which you can do a lot of sound design work.
Density shapes the texture of the space, from sparse and airy to rich, layered clouds of sound, and Spread adjusts the stereo width and smooths out the resonances in the space.
Then, in the middle, you can find two more shaping parameters for the Haze hybrid effect. Scale sets the size and tone from tight metallic textures to vast, open spaces, while Motion introduces rich modulation and delay. It introduces tape-like flutter and evolving harmonics.
Not enough atmospheric or dreamy? No problem. You can also activate a smear filter with which you can add intensity and texture. It also ships with 20 presets in a dedicated preset browser.
I’m not sure if you can still call this a chorus. For me, it’s more of an ambient reverb. That’s why I called it Hybrid Chorus,
Creative Filtering
Besides the Haze plugin, Lunacy Audio has the Filter plugin, which is simpler. As the name suggests, it’s a free filter plugin that ships with various state-variable filters, including low-pass, band-pass, high-pass, low-shelf, bell, high-shelf, peak, and notch options.
For more advanced and creative filtering journeys, it also ships with comb and formant filters. Cutoff and resonance (Q) give you classic controls over the filters.
Alongside this, you can set the stereo image, modify the filter slope scaling up to 8x, and quantize the band frequency to musical pitch. For this task, the plugin has a note-snake feature.
Like the Lunacy Audio Haze plugin, Filter also ships with a preset browser with 20 ready-to-use presets.
First Impression
Two lovely free plugins. The more interesting of the two is undoubtedly the reverb, eh, chorus. I would have given the plugin a different name than Chorus, as it’s more in the direction of atmospheric, lush reverbs than chorusy effects.
Lunacy Audio Haze & Filter are now available for free download from the official website. They run as VST3, AU, and AAX plugins on macOS (native Apple Silicon and Intel) and Windows.
More information here: Lunacy Audio
It’s lunacy in my view that they did not release these “free” plugins for Linux. Oh well, one less thing to learn.